BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - A new tournament
appears on the junior golf landscape next week as the Alabama Junior Golf
Association teams with the Hurricane Junior Golf Tour to host the Birmingham
Junior Open.

The two-day, 36-hole event will
be played Monday and Tuesday, July 1-2, at Limestone Springs Golf Club in
Oneonta.

"There's a lot of opportunities for junior golfers already in the state
of Alabama," said Alabama
Junior Golf Association's Bryant Fortin,
the tournament
director. "(This tournament) just gives
them an additional opportunity to play competitively and grow their game,
hopefully gain some experience."

Fortin said
scores from 36-hole junior events can be turned into the Junior Golf Scoreboard,
which is provides junior golf national rankings.

"On top of
that, based on field size, they have sanctioned points by the American Junior Golf
Association, the AJGA," Fortin continued. "Those points can get you into AJGA
events throughout the nation."

"We run junior tournaments throughout the entire state of Alabama,"
Fortin said. "We do about 50 to 60 a year, the majority of them in the
summertime. The Hurricane Junior Golf Tour, currently they are a regional
junior golf tour. They're based out of Jacksonville, Fla., and they run
tournaments all throughout the Southeast."

They're looking to become a
national program in the next coming years. They have reached out to us to see
if we could kind of partner up and help grow the game of golf in the state of Alabama.
Being that they are in the Southeast, they started coming to Alabama this year
and their second tournament of the season is the Birmingham Junior Open which
is at Limestone Springs on July 1 and 2. We're just trying to pump it up and get all
the kids involved that we can. It's going to be a great event.

The
registration deadline for the Birmingham Junior Open was 11:59 p.m. on Thursday.
The Hurricane Junior Golf Tour and Alabama Junior Golf are collaborating on the
following additional events: